He Chose the Affair Partner Over Me and Our Child

Save for flying fists and tire irons, Confused is describing a potential batterer. A lot of what Confused wrote (which may be leaving a lot out) raises some serious red flags.

It’s not just that virtually all batterers cheat due to whatever attachment disorder/personality disorder also drives domestic abuse. It’s not just that Confused’s controlling partner is giving every indication that he quite spookily shares the classic, telltale, truly bizarre batterer trait of becoming more abusive (in whatever way) towards a pregnant partner/postpartum partner (why victims are at greatest statistical risk of lethal violence from abusive partners during pregnancy/postpartum). But the threat of self violence and the fact he puts an infant’s health at risk (in the not-quite-post-covid period??) by not feeding the child for extended periods.

Holy crap. One can only imagine how the baby cries and shows distress during those times yet this individual has such deeply impaired empathy– possibly even sadistic tendencies– that he’s able to ignore that distress. Never mind how this abuser’s traumatizing behavior during Confused’s pregnancy has been clinically shown to damage infants’ immune systems and future neurological functioning (maternal cortisol spikes from severe stress are toxic to fetuses. Clearly Confused’s cortisol was so high it impaired milk supply); never mind how stressing an infant by withholding nourishment or even liquid can continue to impair that child’s development and immune functioning. The fact alone that this guy can ignore signs of extreme distress in a baby or any human being is terrifying. Consequently, if I were calculating statistical risks in some official capacity, I would put Confused and her baby in a very high risk category for future injury or worse.

When I worked in advocacy back in the day, I was shocked at how much nuanced information there was to learn regarding abusers’ behavior, entrapping tactics, MOs and psychological freakery. Then once I started to comprehend the statistical risks of DV and massive costs to society, I was even more shocked that people aren’t being trained to recognize the signs and understand and resist (which requires understanding) the tactics by middle school. In this case I would encourage Confused to immediately seek resources related to Coercive Control (there are several in the UK) and start getting a crash course in recognizing the behaviors she’s being subjected to for what they are and, in doing so, gaining some perspective on and resistance against how these abusive behaviors have entrapped her both mentally and realistically.

Though fortunately in the UK there are criminal laws against coercive control, I’m not there and the laws are so new it’s hard to know how enforcement works in realistic contexts. Plus, from what Confused has written, this abuser appears to be engaging in coercive control in a tricky, indirect way that may or may not meet the criminal standard for coercive control. I think the abusive partner’s endangering refusal to feed a vulnerable infant until the victim rushes back home could potentially qualify as criminal coercive control because he is essentially “flexing” and demonstrating his capacity to do real harm to a child unless the victim gets back in her isolation box at home. Flexing that capacity is as good as telling the victim that he is similarly capable of endangering/injuring her though, as we all know, threats to a child are far more shattering than even direct threats to ourselves. Make no mistake: this is violence.

But other things he’s doing might fall short of establishing a criminal pattern of coercion. For instance, it seems he did the typical abuser “oblique threat of violence” by threatening suicide if he didn’t get his way. Make no mistake that, regardless of official interpretation, this reads as a direct threat of violence to most people’s hardwired, ancient lizard brain response to danger because

1) Deep down in our guts/lizard brains, we all know how easily “violence turned inwards” can suddenly turn outward and statistics back this up. People who threaten or engage in suicidal behavior are statistically far more likely to be violent to others. To our lizard brains, violence is violence is violence and any threat of it will– depending on individual resources to escape or lack thereof– drive the recipients of these threats to either fight/flee or freeze/fawn (aka, captor bonding/Stockholm syndrome);

2) Threatening to kill himself while his partner and infant are financially dependent is a not-so-subtle attack on the latter’s survival. Financial abuse and threats of financial ruin– particularly when children are involved– are officially viewed as “intimate partner violence” in expert circles;

3) Once someone indicates that they may kill themselves due to something their victim does or doesn’t do, they are automatically setting up a threatening dynamic under which they may very well perceive the victim deserves violence (being that the victim is, according to the abuser, threatening the life of the abuser).

Also remember the adage that “every accusation from a narcissist is a confession.” If an abusive individual accuses a victim of trying to kill them or claims the victim’s actions could lead to the abuser’s death, this should be interpreted as the abuser feeling justified in killing the victim or imperiling the latter’s survival in some way.

One important event has arisen due to the movement to criminalize coercive control, which is to finally correct the old-timey false, cartoon notion that batterers beat up their partners up 24/7. Through forty or more years of exhaustive clinical and social research, advocates like forensic psychologist Evan Stark have demonstrated that patterns of subviolent abuse like coercive control are the best statistical predictors of eventual violence and that roughly half of all domestic violence murders were not preceded by any previous reports of violence. Frequent direct violence or any violence aren’t even necessary to terrorize most victims into complete paralysis. Instead most abusers engage in coercive control to maintain their victims’ constant state of anxiety and fear which is why most survivors cite psychological abuse and control to be far more damaging than violent assault.

Just two afterthoughts regarding certain “nuanced” bits of information on domestic violence dynamics that I think most people don’t hear about or consider:

–If the choice of an affair partner seems confusing (due to the typical cultural myth that people only cheat with more attractive, sexy, more charming, etc., affair partners), consider the idea that affair partners are chosen for the latter’s potential to help harm the primary partner. Through the lens that cheating is an oblique expression of rage/punishment towards a primary partner (almost like the abuser is doing it in place of the deeper drive to, say, club the victim to death) then it makes perfect sense that the abuser, when searching for a partner in proverbial (or actual) crime, would plum the gutter to find the worst co-scumbag they could.

— It’s a mistake to assume that victims cling harder to cheating abusers out of pure jealousy or possessiveness. In days of yore this used to be seen as proof that victims really liked being abused. But instead it’s typically because victims of coercive control sense in their guts that their abusers relative “mercy” may hinge on victims’ sexual “usefulness.” The idea is that why would an abuser kill the person they still want to fuck? So it would follow that the threat of being sexually replaced signals that the abusers’ gloves might be really coming off and the abuse could increase to the point of threatening victims’ survival. In situations where it is difficult for victims to leave (lack of resources or the statistically valid fear that the abuse may spiral the moment the victim attempts to escape), it’s a typical panicked response to try to mitigate the seeming cause of increased sense of risk by trying to prevent themselves from being replaced. It shouldn’t be confused with “masochism” since it’s actually an understandable attempt– knee-jerk, short-sighted and panicked as it is– to promote survival. Of course the panic makes it hard for victims to understand that the real threat comes from the abuser themselves, not the abuser’s choice of co-conspiritor.

— Cheating by an abuser may in itself be a red flag for future violence. Certain abusers tend to cheat precisely because they are catastrophically ashamed of their own pathological, infantile dependency on primary partners (due to whatever horror show, zero sum game upbringing that turned them into abusers). It’s arguably related to something termed “masked dependency” in social research (Erich Fromm). The idea is that the abuser will go to any length to conceal/mask this infantile dependency from others and from themselves. In that view, cheating could arguably be an attempt by abusers to hedge bets against pathological fear of abandonment or an attempt to “dilute” the abusers’ dependency on a primary partner by spreading it out among more than one partner. It could also be an attempt to mask dependency by “displacing” that fear of abandonment onto the victim (inducing the victim to become clingy to prevent being replaced) by engaging in symbolic abandonment of the victim.

But because this pathological terror of abandonment also tends to trigger feelings of rage and resentment towards primary partners in abusers (as they paranoically imagine that their victims cultivate and enjoy this power), this might explain why, statistically, abusers who “mask” their dependency can also be the most dangerous when victims attempt to escape. By the same token, because of the typical element of triangulation in affairs where knowing affair partners are deputized by abusers to exhibit hostility towards betrayed primary partners, It can be a lethal mistake to assume that all cheaters are exit-cheating and are dismissing primary partners because that view fails to predict the potentially violent, even lethal efforts these abusers will make to bring their victims back under control. From a paper on domestic violence: Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships.

As the power imbalance magnifies, the subjugated person feels more negative in
their self-appraisal, more incapable of fending for themselves, and is, thus, increasingly
more in need of the dominator. This cycle of relationship-produced dependency and
lowered self-esteem is repeated, eventually creating a strong affective bond from the
low to high power person. Concommitantly, the person in the high power position
develops an inflated sense of their own power (just as the low power person develops
an exaggerated sense of their own powerlessness) which masks the extent to which they [the abusers] are dependent on the low power person to maintain their feeling of, as Fromm (1973) put it, “the transformation of impotence into omnipotence” (p. 322).

This omnipotence, however, is predicated on the dominator’s ability to maintain
absolute control in the dyadic relationship. When the symbiotic roles which maintain
this sense of power are disturbed, the masked dependency of the dominator on the
subjugated person is suddenly revealed. One example of this sudden reversal of the
power dynamic is the desperate control attempts on the part of the abandoned battering
husband to bring his wife back (through surveillance, intimidation, etc.).